Need Help Finding Slideshow Plugin

Over the past couple of days, I have been trying to find a simple, straightforward slideshow plugin for a site I am building. I would like to insert a slideshow near the top of my homepage that cycles through a couple of slides which I can link to important pages and entries. For reference, here are a couple of examples of what I am looking for from non-wordpress based sites (all of them political as it turns out):

http://www.kurtschrader.com/
http://www.ricklarsen.org/
http://www.standtallforamerica.com/
http://www.margaretforgovernor.com/

or even something slightly more complex such as:
http://www.markeyforcongress.com/

Out of those, I would say the Schrader slideshow is ideal, with the very simple navigation. It would be great if there’s something out there where I can just upload an image for the slide and then input the url to link it to. Having it as a widget I could plug into a sidebar would be a bonus.

I have tried a number of plugins but for various reasons none of them have seemed to work:

NextGen gallery slideshows
Content Slide Plugin
Featured Content Gallery
Frontpage-slideshow
vSlider
WP Slideshow

Does anyone know of a plugin similar to what I am looking for, or how I can configure one to function this way? Thanks for the help.